


Listen to Your Head

by MoonlightTaylor



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Getting Together, Inception - Freeform, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), mentions of trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:27:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23377633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonlightTaylor/pseuds/MoonlightTaylor
Summary: Steve and Tony haven't seen each other since they fought in Siberia two years ago. Tony has fallen into a coma after a fight with Victor von Doom and no one seems to know what's wrong or how to get him out. When Steve hears about this, he decides two years is long enough. He enlists Wanda's help to wake Tony up. Except, that's not as easy as it seems. To wake Tony up Steve has to travel into his friends mind.He meets different versions of Tony, visits memories and somewhere along the line starts to realise that these strong feelings he has for Tony might be more than just friendship...
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 59





	1. red, white and blue

**Author's Note:**

> “There's a million combinations and I am one  
> There's a million ways to win or lose  
> There's a million ways to cheat  
> There's a million ways to show yourself”  
> ~ The Kaiser Chiefs: Listen to Your Head

**Chapter 1: red, white, blue**

The hospital is surprisingly quiet at this time of night. Somehow, Steve still associates these places with cold grey bed sheets and the swishing skirts of nurses. Modern hospitals seem colder still. He looks over his shoulder at his companion. Wanda seems at least as uncomfortable as he is, and he can’t help but wonder what horrible things she’s seen done in places like these. He gives her an encouraging smile. She doesn’t return it.

Getting into the hospital had been disconcertingly easy; there aren’t many doors a patented Captain America smile can’t open. Still. Steve’s presence here isn’t exactly legal, and just walking on American soil could get him imprisoned. If his smile doesn’t work, Wanda will just have to put whoever is in their way to sleep. That’s one of the reasons he brought her: she’s the best cavalry he has. The other reason is lying in a bed behind one of these doors. 

The door they’re looking for is looms ahead, guarded by a burly man in a suit. Steve thanks whatever deity is available that it’s not Happy Hogan because then just the sight of Wanda and him would be enough to sound the alarm. This isn’t anyone he’s ever met before.

One more look in Wanda’s direction, a short non-verbal conversation. She knows what to do if this all goes wrong. He takes a deep breath, reminds himself this is all worth it, then strides up to the guard like he owns the place.

Two minutes later, they’re closing the door behind them, and the guard is staring at a wall, having conveniently forgotten anyone ever interrupted his shift. If someone were to look very closely, they might just see a glint of red in his eyes.

After shoving a chair under the door handle, Steve turns to the single bed occupying the room. It looks big and plushy, and not like anything he remembers from his own stays long ago. Wires and tubes snake from the patient to the many machines lining the wall. Soft beeps mark out the staccato beating of a heart.

Everything is stark white. Too white. Nothing surrounding Tony has ever been this white before.

Steve hesitates near the foot of the bed. It’s been two years since he laid eyes on this man. Two years since they were even in one room together. Two years of silence, of shame, of anger and regret.

It feels like a lifetime. Or it did.

The man in the bed looks pale, thin and small underneath the heavy blankets, but someone has been trimming his goatee, and it’s so _Tony_ it makes Steve ache. One look at that face, and all their time apart just melts away.

Two years of watching his best friend through a television screen, and not a second of that ever felt as real as this.

“We should not waste time,” Wanda says, while walking around the bed and sitting down on a cushioned chair, “There is only an hour before the nurse comes.”

“Right,” Steve says, and he shakes off the residual melancholy. He’s got work to do.

Steve grabs a folding chair from up against a wall and sits down at the other side of the bed. With a look of concentration, red tendrils start appearing like a spider’s web along Wanda’s fingers. They creep slowly towards Tony’s face, their glow casting strange shadows along his goatee. Steve is transfixed by the sight of it.

God, he’s missed that face. A whole lot more than he cares to admit.

He’s missed humorous back-and-forths before missions and deep talks on the compound roof. He’s missed coming home from his morning run to find Tony drinking coffee almost straight from the pot. Heck, he’d take the fighting over the silence between them these days.

And he would take the violent, frothing man in Siberia over the empty shell on the bed before him now.

A hiss sounds through the room, and the red light disappears. Steve looks up to find Wanda frowning, rubbing her fingers together absentmindedly.

“Nothing?” he asks.

Wanda shakes her head, “There is some kind of… barrier. I cannot see or hear anything, but I can feel something inside.”

Steve purses his lips. The news of Tony’s coma was made public a little over 5 months ago. A catastrophic fight with Victor von Doom had led to an enormous explosion of bright blue light in the middle of the Sahara. According to the news, all the sand within a five-mile radius of the place had turned to shimmering glass. Tony and von Doom had been found on opposite ends of the circle, a bit singed but otherwise physically fine.

Except for, you know, the coma.

Steve supposes he should be happy his friend is so famous. He should be happy for the incessant bulletins and paparazzi that paid no mind to Colonel Rhodes’ pleas for privacy and instead ran every possible story about Iron Man’s situation. Without them, he would never even have known this was happening.

A bit of additional research (perks of having Natasha on their side) had led to Tony’s medical files. According to those, there’s distinctive brain activity, but no consciousness. It’s not even clear if the coma was caused by the strange blast that hit Tony, or by the long fall after he was hit.

At first, Steve was going to let it go. 

Tony had money, he had talented and intelligent friends and technology that would drag him out of that coma in no time. There was no need to worry. Besides, it was none of Steve’s business anymore. But then the months started dragging on. Press conferences were getting shorter, Colonel Rhodes’ hair was getting steadily greyer, Miss Potts looking more tired by the day.

All the while, Tony slept.

People were starting to worry. _Steve_ was starting to worry.

So, Natasha had gone to get the files, Steve had read them and then he’d convinced Wanda to come here with him. He hadn’t been sure she’d agree at first. The relationship between Tony and her has always been strained. Blame and mistrust have been thrown between them in some ridiculous form of emotional tennis. Not exactly the kind of relationship that would lead to her risking her life for the man.

To everyone’s surprise, she’d agreed. In fact, there had only been one person to disagree. Bucky had been adamant about not wanting anything to do with, in his words, ‘ _messing with someone else’s mind_ ’.

But it’d been almost five months by that point. Steve couldn’t see any other way, and the others knew him well enough to tell he wasn’t going to let this go.

So here they are, a witch and a disgraced supersoldier, secretly trying to gain access to one of the most brilliant minds of their age. This world truly seems to get stranger by the day.

“So there’s nothing you can do?” Steve asks, while violently repressing the urge to run his hand through Tony’s hair.

“Maybe,” Wanda answers, but she doesn’t sound too sure, “when I touched the barrier, it felt like it was trying to… pull me in. Swallow me. I think I could maybe send someone in.”

“You could send a person into his mind?”

“I suppose I could put someone’s mind in his. But we do not know what would happen then and I do not think I could get anyone back. They would be sucked in.”

Steve looks back down at his friend, disturbingly quiet on the bed. His thoughts wind back to their last conversation: words cried between violent blows. Is that to be his last exchange with a man who means so much to him? Years of exile and difference in opinion may have driven a wedge between them, but there’s still hope in Steve they may eventually see eye to eye again. Thing is, Tony needs to open his eyes for that, and he can’t do it on his own.

Steve makes his decision as he often does: suddenly and certainly.

He looks up at Wanda and says, “Send me in.”

“You?” She sounds surprised, “Are you sure that is a good idea?”

Steve sends her a soft smile. He knows the rift between the Avengers weighs on her as well. The lack of contact between her and Vision… It can’t be easy. He was one of the few people who never judged her for her decision to join HYDRA, something rare even within their current team.

For Steve, her decisions have never been difficult to understand. He did almost exactly what she did; let some less-than-savoury people experiment on him to win a war. And he didn’t even have the excuse of grief and revenge.

She may be right though, what if Tony doesn’t want to talk to him? What if his presence drives the man deeper into a coma? Then again, what if it works? Steve has never shied away from a risk in his life and he’s not about to start now.

“I’m sure I can convince him to come out, I’m his -” He had wanted to say ‘friend’, but echoes of Siberia still haunt him ( _‘He’s my friend.” “So was I.”_ ). Wanda seems thoroughly unimpressed, though to be honest, that seems to just be what her face is like most of the time. “I can help him.”

“I would not be able to get you out. Minds are fragile things…. You might get trapped, you might do more damage.”

“I won’t,” Steve assures, as he leans forward and rests his hand on hers, “I need to do this, Wanda. I can’t just sit around and do nothing while he wastes away.”

“You still care much for him,” Wanda says.

Steve wonders if she’s just saying that, or if she felt something in him, because as soon as she says it, all his previous anger clamps down on his heart again. He _does_ care for Tony. He always has, even if sometimes he wants to throttle the man. But it’s the kind of caring that goes unnamed because there are no words for it. It’s deep and all-encompassing, and all the more terrifying for it.

“I know you’ve had your differences, heck, so have I, but... he doesn’t deserve to die like this. No one does. I’ll find my way out, I always do.”

Wanda’s eyes flicker between Steve and the bed. Deep down he knows she’ll say yes. For all her bravado, she is disturbingly easily influenced by him. She trusts him implicitly (and sometimes too much, he fears). Besides, he knows she enjoys using her powers as much as he enjoys punching a sandbag - there’s nothing quite like flexing muscles you didn’t always have.

“Okay.” She nods. “But promise me this: come back.”

Steve smiles and nods in return, then runs his gaze over Tony. Bucky is going to kill him for this, but for once he doesn’t really care. It’s time to get his friend back. He shakes off his nerves and then looks back up at Wanda.

“So, how does this work?”

By way of an answer, Wanda grabs his hand and lays her other over Tony’s head. Red starts curling around her fingers again, and he can feel it, like a breath against his skin. It tingles up his arm, over his shoulder and neck into his head until he starts seeing things in shades of red and pink. He feels himself getting tired.

Suddenly, the warm red gives way to cool, electric blue. It sucks him in, grabs him somewhere behind the eyes, somewhere near the base of his skull and pullspullspulls until he slams, brain first, into that cold, blue wall.

His last thoughts before he fades out are of the icy sea in which he lost everything.

* * *

Steve opens his eyes to Tony's goatee floating a few inches from his face. He's about to scream when he realises that the goatee is actually attached to a chin, which is attached to a head, which is attached to a man. 

“Steve?” the man asks incredulously.

“Tony,” Steve replies. His head feels as though it just went a few rounds with the Hulk. 

It takes a moment for him to get his bearings. He’s flat on his back, with Tony leaning over him, in a glistening white room which seems to have no beginning or end. To one side he can make out what looks like a white TV screen, and to another he can see a speaking pew. For his part, Tony is dressed in one of his immaculate business suits, hair slicked back with pink hued glasses on his nose.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. He extends his hand and Steve takes it, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet. Tony looks good: healthier and younger than he is in real life, but with his shades down and his business attire, it is still difficult to read him.

“I came to help you get out of here,” he says awkwardly, unsure of how much Tony even knows about his predicament. It’s been so long since they’ve been face to face, and so much has happened, that Steve doesn’t even know where to begin.

Tony eyes him for a moment, expression unreadable behind the glasses. Steve’s heart is in his throat, beating a mile a minute. He’s ready for an argument or a fight. He’s not ready for what actually happens: civility.

“Right,” says Tony, “And where is _here_ exactly?”

That’s a good question. Not the one he was expecting, but a very good question indeed.

Where _is_ here? It’s Tony’s head, of that much Steve is certain, but he’s confused by his surroundings. The clean, cold white of the space, the emptiness; it’s not at all what Steve had expected his friend’s legendary brain to look like on the inside. He’d expected more… well, more. More technology, certainly, more thoughts swirling to and fro. This is just a blank canvas and that worries Steve. What if the thing that hit Tony somehow erased part of his brain? What if that’s why he isn’t mentioning the Accords?

He looks over at Tony, who is looking at him expectantly, as if he holds all the answers. Steve wants to break it to him slowly, but instead opts for more of a ‘like a bandaid’ approach.

“I know what I'm about to say is going to sound crazy, but… We're in your mind.”

He waits for the inevitable snarky remark or snort of laughter, but it doesn't come. Tony glances over at the screen and shrugs. “That makes a weird amount of sense actually.”

“It does?” Steve asks dubiously.

“Yeah. I’ve been here a while and I’ve scoured just about every inch of this place. I keep hearing these disembodied voices saying things like ‘coma’ and ‘neurons’,” Tony says, then points at the screen, “And when I turn that thing on I get this sort of... static.”

The screen comes to life as soon as Tony mentions it, and indeed it is completely dark save for shifting lights and spots of colour that appear and disappear seemingly at random. It reminds Steve immediately of what he sees when he rubs his eyes too hard. 

“You know,” Tony continues, in an almost conspiriatory tone this time, “A while ago, I could have sworn I saw a Wanda-shaped blob of red on the screen.”

Though Steve tries to keep his face impassive, something must have changed because Tony pulls his glasses dramatically from his nose and uses one of the legs to point at him.

“AHA! I _knew_ it! I’m unconscious for half a second and already people are rooting around in my brain! How did you two even get in to see me? Have you been pardoned? I told Rhodey-”

“Rhodes had nothing to do with this. Nobody knows we’re here.”

Tony squints dangerously, “What, you just decided to risk your freedom to visit me? That’s a pretty stupid thing to do.”

“You’ve been in a coma for half a year, Tony. This was pretty much a last resort.”

A moment of silence falls over them as they both look anywhere but at each other. It hasn’t escaped Steve that this is the first conversation they’ve had in a long time, and while he hates the glib, businessman side of Tony that his friend’s brain has conjured, he can’t help feeling strangely at home. He’s also glad to hear Tony hasn’t forgotten about their fight, and for now, he’s happy to not have to mention it. They have a job to do.

Steve likes order in his To Do lists. And currently, his reads as follows:

  1. Get out of Tony’s head
  2. Bury the hatchet
  3. Whatever comes next



It’s a very comprehensive list. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Tony speaks again after a moment of thoughtful silence. “A coma, huh. So what happened exactly? The last thing I remember is flying over Doom’s Gothic Little Princess Castle: Sand Edition, and then this."

“There was some kind of explosion. No one knows what it was.”

“That’s probably because I’m not working on figuring it out,” Tony says and he’s probably right, but Steve doesn’t like arrogance on a good day (and this is a _bad_ day) so he doesn’t know how to answer that without starting a fight.

Tony, for his part, just keeps talking.

“Did Doom at least get hit, too? If that arrogant bastard managed to put me in a coma without getting hurt himself, I swear I’m retiring. I’m not sure my fragile ego could stand the humiliation. I can already see the papers…”

“Doom’s also in a coma, actually.” Steve smiles.

“Really? Great,” Tony says with a smug smile, “I mean. I’m in a coma, we don’t know why, we don’t know how to get me out, and on top of that I’ve got a juiced up supersoldier galavanting around in my brain. But at least I finally managed to knock Doom out.”

Steve can’t stop the smile that curls up the corners of his mouth. That’s the thing about Tony: one moment he has you wanting to throttle him and the next you can’t help but being taken in by his odd brand of charm.

“We’ve faced worse odds.”

“True,” Tony says, but it sounds more like a sneer than an agreement. Steve knows he’s hinting at that fight in Siberia, but he’s long decided not to rise to the bait. Tony continues seamlessly, “well, now that you’ve shared your useless version of events, let me tell you what I’ve found.”

He walks up to the screen and pulls a panel out from the wall next to it. He realises now, that though the room seems endless, it isn’t. It takes several hard looks to see where the floor melds seamlessly into the walls and leaves Steve dizzy with confusion. Tony tugs frustratedly at the wires that come streaming out of the pane.

“I’ve been trying to hack into the screen to see if I could find out what the hell was going on, but it’s not going too well. It’s almost like I’ve forgotten how wires and circuits work.”

Steve raises an eyebrow, “You’ve forgotten how circuits work?”

“I know, it’s insane! I can remember knowing how, but every time I try to actually do something with the information, it all seems to disappear.”

Dread pools in Steve’s stomach. Maybe he was right when he considered brain damage. Tony Stark not knowing how circuits work: Steve had thought he’d see hell freeze over before that happened.

“But!” Tony continues, grabbing something from his pocket and showing it off with about as much pride as Rafiki had while holding Simba up in the air, “I found this usb stick - which is très retro, by the way, haven’t used these things in at least a decade - and when I plug it in…”

He plugs it in. The screen lights up and reads DATA INCOMPLETE in bright green against black.

“What does that mean?” Steve asks.

Tony gives him a look that suggests he believes Steve has the brain content of a pancake, which is just plain annoying really. He’s not a stupid person. In fact, he has it on good authority that his intelligence is actually above average (for both humans and pancakes) but when he’s with Tony he always ends up feeling like an idiot.

“It means what it says. Data incomplete. I’m not complete.”

The only answer Steve can come up with to that is _you’re complete to me_. But he wisely keeps his mouth shut on that thought. Besides, it’s not like Tony ever needs prompting to talk.

“I think whatever put me in this coma did more than just knock me out. I think it shattered me into different pieces. Not to mention,” he says, pointing at the screen again, “It’s using Windows XP, so whatever it is _clearly_ trying to torture me into insanity. I’ve done my time with XP! Three years of it! At MIT! And now, when I’m at my _lowest_ and _most incomplete_ it’s coming back to haunt me!”

Most of the second half of that speech goes right over Steve’s head but he nods as if he understands because he’s very much trying to avoid being looked at like a pancake again. More important though, is the fact that Tony has a working theory.

“You think you were split into different pieces?”

Tony nods. “Split, compartmentalised, whatever you want to call it.”

“Then there must be more of you somewhere… But where?”

“Well, probably behind that door,” Tony says innocently and as soon as he does, Steve sees a door materialise between them.

“There was a door all this time? Why didn’t you lead with that?”

Tony shrugs. “Why didn’t you kill Hitler? We all make mistakes.”

Steve wants to be more irritated but when he looks back at his friend it’s to find him staring at the door, a strange expression on his face. He looks almost… sad. The emotion looks wrong against his carefully crafted look of nonchalance.

“Do you ever feel like you’re just a cog in a much larger machine?” he asks.

Something about the way he says it resonates which Steve, makes him think of SHIELD and HYDRA, of the enormous machine that is the American military apparatus. It makes him think of 200 punches straight to Hitler’s nose. He’d drawn himself as a monkey on a unicycle back then, these days he might have drawn his face in the gears of a large watch: a man out of time turning around and around in a never-changing direction.

“All the time,” he sighs.

“I bet. I haven’t felt like that in a long time, and I _don’t_ like it. I can’t even fix a simple circuit box right now, and that’s just wrong.”

“Right. Well, I’m here to help you get out. Guess we just have to find the part of you that can fix things.”

“Still calling the shots, huh Cap?” Tony says and his smile seems caught somewhere between fond and violently sharp. “Let’s go put Humpty together again.”

They both shake off their fit of melancholy and head for the door.


	2. snap, crackle and pop

The door opens soundlessly and gives way to an ethereal, dark blue space. It looks endless: a glistening floor stretching into the distance and on it, a web of lighter blue lines winding forever beneath their feet. Steve is immediately reminded of the reactor Tony used to have in his chest. All the lines seem to converge in the middle, where they connect to a strange machine engulfed in a mess of wires.

Around them, hovering in the air, are screens: some with film reels, some with complicated schematics. Numbers scroll past here and there in fast flashes of the brightest blue. Multiple voices overlap and coalesce, echoing disembodied through the space around them.

The overload of information takes Steve aback for a moment, but then he remembers where he is. This is Tony’s brain, and frankly this is exactly what he had expected it to look like: organised chaos.

Tony moves forward as if this all normal, stopping in front of the machine in the middle and running his fingers over various wires. A barrage of numbers runs right through him and he doesn’t seem to notice. When it passes by Steve, he feels static tickling his arms. A disembodied voice (which sounds suspiciously like JARVIS) cries out an indignant ‘sir!’

“Is this what your mind is like all the time?” Steve asks. He’s not sure if he’s more impressed or concerned. If he had this much going on in his mind it would drive him absolutely insane.

“Hmm? Oh yeah, this is a pretty quiet day,” Tony answers.

“Quiet?” Steve squeaks, while dodging a passing sketch of what looks like a fridge on roller skates, he’s about to look into it more when Tony speaks again.

“Not everyone’s brain explodes when they have more than two thoughts at once, Cap,” he says, while signalling for Steve to come closer. Ordinarily, Steve would be offended, as he often is when Tony brags about his genius intellect, but the sheer chaos here is enough to silence him. He moves to stand next to the machine, eyeing it with interest.

“So, what is it?” Steve asks. He wants to touch it but he’s afraid it might suddenly come to life (and considering whose mind he’s in, that fear isn’t at all unreasonable).

A few seconds of silence stretch between them (apart from another disembodied voice which speaks in what Steve _thinks_ is Italian). Then Tony drops the wires in his hands and sighs.

“I have no idea. I tried to make sense of all this before you arrived, but I couldn’t really figure it out. ‘S far as I can tell, it’s completely random.”

Steve eyes the machine. From one look alone, he’s counting at least nine buttons in various colours, as well as several levers that all seem connected to the wires. Even for Tony, this looks unnecessarily complicated.

“If you can’t even figure it out, then who can?”

“I’m only part of the brain, remember. And not the mechanic-slash-genius part.” He sends Steve one of those smirks he hates and adds, “Clearly, I’m much more handsome. And I don’t spend all my time wasting away in a lab.”

“So, we need to go to the lab!” Steve cries out, ignoring the way the other man is trying to goad him with his arrogance. Again, Tony sends Steve a look that seems to question every last iota of his intelligence. For someone who just admitted to not being a genius, he sure is full of himself.

“I don’t know how to get there, remember? Because I don’t know how this,” Tony points angrily at the machine, “ _thing_ works.”

Right. Well, that does complicate things. Steve stares at the mess of wires and takes Tony in from the corner of his eye. He looks more like himself here than he ever did on camera, and Steve’s glad to see it. Still, there’s something kind of… unfinished about this version of Tony. Something Steve can’t quite put his finger on.

Tony frowns, but doesn’t look at Steve. Instead, he focuses on following the course of a wire in a brilliantly ugly shade of purple.

“You know,” he says eventually, with a bit less swagger than he’s been giving since Steve woke up, “This is very _Inception_ \- did I ever show you that movie? I can’t remember, but if I didn’t you should definitely check it out. Anyway, this, all of this, is so fucking crazy. Seriously. I am consciously experiencing the workings of my own mind. Usually this all just kind of…” Tony waves his hands vaguely, “ _happens_.”

Having never studied psychology, Steve isn’t sure if what Tony is mentioning is normal, but he can certainly say it’s true for himself. Thoughts usually come and go without rhyme nor reason and he wouldn’t even know where to start guessing what the inside of his brain looks like. Then again, he’s not sure he even wants to know. Seeing the workings of someone else’s brain is strange enough, the thought of seeing his own is terrifying.

Not that Tony looks in any way terrified. On the contrary, he seems to be _enjoying_ this.

He rattles on, “I’m going to write a paper on this when we get out. How is _Sexy on the Outside, Sexier on the Inside_ for a title? I think it could work. That is, if I don’t accidentally press the self-destruct button or something.”

That’s enough to shake Steve out of his thoughts. A self-destruct button? The mere idea of it gives him cold sweats.

“Maybe we should just explore the room?” he suggests (anything to keep Tony away from potentially dangerous, red buttons), “There might be some answers hidden here somewhere.”

Tony seems to think about it for a moment, eyes darting over the intricate pattern of lines beneath them. The ‘mechanic’ part may be separated, but there’s obviously still enough of a genius left in the man. A dangerous little smile flits over his face and Steve instinctively knows, with a sudden, gut-wrenching certainty that the man is about to do something stupid.

Before Steve can so much as think the word ‘no’, Tony is grabbing his arm and, in one vicious move, pulling down the lever attached to that purple wire.

Steve wants to scream, but then the world explodes into a cold, electric place, where words don’t exist. No, not a place. A non-place. A place where space doesn’t exist, where _time_ doesn’t exist. It takes seconds and centuries before the world starts to render around them again. It does so a pixel at a time, outlines forming square by tiny square and slowly building into a strangely familiar scene. 

Strangely, because he’s suddenly seeing it from the wrong side. He’s standing on a large stage, on a disk that turns slowly as if to let him take in the scene. A large crowd is amassed before him, behind him there are fireworks and dancers in outfits so skimpy they almost make him blush. He hates that he still recognises the red and gold bikinis for what they represent: Iron Man costumes. Behind them, between the fireworks and under a glittering night sky are words he’s definitely seen before. 

STARK EXPO 

Immediately, Steve feels like he’s been thrown back in time. He remembers walking through the crowd below, Bucky leading the way, with his latest conquest by his side. He remembers looking up at the great spinning globe in awe, flinching when Howard Stark’s flying car crashed to the ground. 

Logically, he knows this can never be the same Stark Expo he’d wandered all those years ago. Not with the Iron Man dancers, not in the head of a man who wouldn’t come into being until decades later. It feels strange though, being here. An echo of an echo of an echo, sounding through time, tying him and Bucky and the Starks together. So many little coincidences that led a scrawny boy from Brooklyn to the strange brainscape of a genius billionaire. 

He’s so caught up in his musings, it takes him a while to realise that he’s speaking - not purposefully, not his own words. He sounds like Tony, feels his mouth move along with the words. When his hands go up it’s without his consent and then he sees they’re not his hands at all. They’re Tony’s. 

It hits him suddenly what this is. It’s a memory. Tony’s memory. And it’s replaying the only way it knows how: from Tony’s perspective. 

There’s something terrifying about it, about being stuck in this body with no control over it, forced to watch this scene play out. He sees what Tony saw, hears what Tony heard, feels what Tony felt. 

And it’s a lot. Glittering lights, millions of faces, screaming voices, squealing repulsors, the unfamiliar weight of the arc reactor heavy on his chest, weariness, giddiness, drunkenness…

Before Steve even has time to take it all in properly, fireworks go off behind him, and with them the world twists back out of focus, spinning back from black and red into the same white and blue emptiness that brought him here.

Steve crashes to the ground in the dark blue room, half a foot away from the strange machine. 

He gets to his knees and stretches to feel if all his limbs are still attached. They are. A loud groan sounds from somewhere to his right and Steve looks over to see a crumpled heap which vaguely resembles Tony. They both stand up, panting and Steve has to repress the urge to step closer and either check his friend over or clock him in the face. 

Instead, Steve asks indignantly, “What did you do that for?” 

“It was _fine_ ,” the billionaire says, “Just a sweet little memory from my past, nothing sinister.”

“Nothing sinister? It felt like… It felt like I was about to die! That can’t be good!”

“Oh no, don’t worry about that. I was kind of dying at the time, so it’s probably just part of the memory.”

“You were dying?!” Steve squeaks out. He never read that in any report, never heard anyone mention it either. 

“You know, you sound just like Pepper when you say that,” he says. Then, when he catches the horrified look on Steve’s face, he makes a soothing gesture, “I survived didn’t I? So it’s all fine and dandy.”

“This time! But you’re always doing this! You can’t just go around pulling random levers in your head! We had no idea what would happen. It could have been a death lever for all we knew.”

“Are all centenarians so dramatic? There was no other way to test it, it’s like they say: sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.”

“ _Nobody says that!_ ” Steve grinds through his teeth. Every second spent together is reminding him more and more why they had a falling out in the first place. 

“I do.” Tony smirks, then, before Steve can say another word, pulls the next lever. 

The world disassembles again, but this time Steve knows what to expect, so he lets it befall him with a disgruntled sort of acceptance.

* * *

A courtroom. Flashing cameras. Strange faces, and between them: Pepper Potts. She makes a circular motion with her finger, tells him to turn and he does. 

“Yes, dear?”

Feral anticipation. Again, that heavy weight on his chest. Five suits: in them, old white men. 

“Can I have your attention?” asks the one in the middle. There’s a plaque in front of him marking him as Senator Stern. 

“Absolutely,” says Tony, says Steve with Tony’s voice, mouth moving without his consent. This isn’t any less terrifying the second time around. 

The senator asks, impatience echoing “Do you, or do you not, possess a specialised weapon?”

“I do not.” Cheeky, clipped: Tony, but the fraying nerves he feels are probably all Steve’s. 

Because, Steve knows of this hearing, has seen summaries of it in reports and has watched parts of it on YouTube. Okay maybe he watched all of it. In his defense, though, it was _research_. He likes to know who he has on his team. 

And, for all the bad press this hearing got, it was the one video of Tony that actually made Steve feel like he might like this man. Maybe the way Tony and Colonel Rhodes interacted, even when pitted against each other, made him think of Bucky and himself. An exasperated smile hidden behind closed hands, looks that carry whole conversations… 

And there had been something very Bucky-esque about Tony, too. The easy sass, the smarmy smile and that ‘stick-it-to-the-man’ attitude that Steve will admire to his dying day. He’d been very lonely back then: a man out of time who had only just discovered the magic of typing something into a search bar and having a whole world of information pop up. 

Most of what Tony did made his teeth grind, but not this video. Fast friendship, attitude and a man named Stark: that was something he could get behind. 

For all that’s changed over the past few years, that hasn’t. Tony still drives Steve crazy with almost everything he does and yet that very same thing makes him feel like he’s home. All this time spent apart, spent as enemies, even, has made him feel lost. Drifting through a world that no longer makes sense. 

Before he can ponder any further, the courtroom dissolves and he’s once again thrown into the dark blue room with the strange machine. 

Tony is already getting up and dusting his suit off unnecessarily. There’s an amused look on his face, and when he turns to meet Steve’s gaze it grows into a smug little smirk. 

“Looks like we’re doing a tour of Tony Stark’s Greatest Hits,” he says and here’s an amused look on his face, and when he turns to meet Steve’s gaze it grows into a smug little smirk.

“Why are you so happy about that?” Steve asks, “We still haven’t found a way out.”

“Oh, untwist your panties, Captain Moody. You have to admit that was kind of fun, telling those guys to stick it. Even you must have enjoyed that.”

Steve feels a small smile turning his own lips as he nods in agreement. Tony turns back to the contraption, fingers tapping on his chest where the arc reactor used to be. The movement is so achingly familiar that Steve barely hears Tony’s next words. 

“If the levers lead to memories, maybe the buttons lead to something else? It’s gotta be worth a try right?”

Steve can’t shake the discongruity between this Tony - tapping on his chest, telling government officials where they can shove their opinions, and the Tony and the furious, unstable man he left behind in Siberia. 

Before he can think it through properly - and hasn’t that always been his curse? - Steve says, “I don’t get it.” 

“What? This?” Tony asks, waving at the strange contraption in front of him, “Don’t worry. I don’t even get it, and it’s my brain.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Though, I don’t get that either. I mean, I don’t understand how you went from not allowing the government to take your suit to allowing them to have control over us a few years later.”

Tony freezes. When he looks up he seems closed off, like he’s shut the blinds and no one can look in anymore. Steve’s impressed at how well he can mask his emotions in his own head. When he speaks, his voice is clipped and businesslike. 

“For the sake of both of our lives, I think it’s probably best if we don’t discuss this issue while we’re stuck in my mind. It might have serious repercussions for both of us.”

For a moment, Steve considers starting the argument anyway. He’s never been one to back down and this version of Tony - the CEO, the billionaire, the media’s favourite star - has always managed to bring out the worst in Steve. But Tony’s right. A fight might do serious damage to an already fractured brain. 

Steve clenches his jaw to keep silent, and instead waves a hand between Tony and the machine, indicating for him to press the button. Tony does so impassionately, with none of the excitement he showed before.

The world dissolves again and Steve spends his time in that timeless place thinking about how much he hates fighting with Tony.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope this isn't too confusing... Let me know what you think! Next chapter will be up soon :)
> 
> A thanks once again to spaceyeli for her beta <3


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